Relocated chart: your birth chart for another city

A relocated chart is a birth chart recalculated for another place on Earth. The moment of birth is the same, to the minute, but the horizon and the meridian are taken for the city where the person lives or plans to move. The idea is simple: at the moment of birth there was one sky for the whole planet, but which part of it was rising in the east and which stood overhead depends on where you watch from. A relocated chart shows what the birth chart would look like had the person been born in the same minute in another city.

What changes and what does not

No planet changes in a relocated chart. The Sun, the Moon and all the other planets stay in the same signs at the same degrees, because their positions on the ecliptic do not depend on where they are seen from. The aspects between planets stay the same too: a Mars-Saturn square in the birth chart is a square in every relocated chart.

Everything tied to place changes:

• The angles. The Ascendant, Descendant, MC and IC move to other degrees, often into other signs.
• The house cusps. The whole house system shifts along with the angles.
• The houses of the planets. A planet in the 5th house of the birth chart may land in the 4th or 6th in a relocated one.
• The chart ruler. If the Ascendant moves into another sign, the planet that rules it changes as well.

Hence the main principle of reading. A relocated chart does not give a person a new character and does not cancel the birth chart. It shows which parts of the same chart come into view in the new place and which step into the background.

How a relocated chart is calculated

The most common mistake is to take the hour of birth in the local time of the new city. That gives a different moment and a different chart. The correct way is first to convert the birth time to Universal Time (UTC) and then to cast the chart for that same UTC moment and the coordinates of the new place. If someone was born at 20:30 Argentine time (UTC−3), that is 23:30 UTC, and in Barcelona at that instant it was 01:30 the next day, local summer time (UTC+2). That moment is what gives the relocated chart for Barcelona.

Modern software does this automatically: you enter the date, time and place of birth, and the new place separately. Without an exact birth time a relocated chart makes as little sense as natal houses do. The angles move about a degree every four minutes, and an error of half an hour shifts the Ascendant by several degrees.

Latitude and longitude

Moving east or west changes mainly the meridian: the MC and IC move by roughly as much as the longitude changes, though not evenly, because the ecliptic is tilted. A move of 15° in longitude equals about an hour of sidereal time, and in that time the MC shifts by about 15°, half a sign.

Moving north or south has more effect on the Ascendant and the size of the houses. The farther from the equator, the more the houses stretch and shrink, and in the Placidus system some cusps cannot be calculated at all above the polar circle. For cities at very high latitudes, astrologers often switch to equal houses or whole-sign houses.

The relocated chart and the map lines

Astrocartography and the relocated chart are calculated from the same data but answer different questions. The map of lines shows the whole world at once: where each planet stands exactly on one of the four angles. The relocated chart shows one place, in detail.

The link between them is direct. If a city lies on the Venus MC line, Venus stands at the Midheaven in the relocated chart for that city. If the city is a few hundred kilometres from the line, Venus in the relocated chart will be near the MC but no longer on it. And if there is no line nearby, the relocated chart will still show which houses the planets fell into and which signs took the angles. So the map is handy for choosing directions, and the relocated chart for checking a particular city.

What to look at in a relocated chart

A rough order of reading:

• The angles and the planets near them. Most important is whether any planet has moved up to the Ascendant, Descendant, MC or IC. A planet within a few degrees of an angle becomes more prominent in the new place. The meaning of each angular planet is covered on the planet pages, for example the Sun or Jupiter.
• The sign on the Ascendant and its ruler. A new rising sign changes the manner in which the person meets new circumstances, and the new ruler shows which function of the chart carries that.
• Planets changing houses. The luminaries, the ruler of the Ascendant and the planets that have changed house suggest which areas of life come forward in the new place.

It is also worth keeping the limits of the method in mind. A relocated chart describes how the emphasis in a chart shifts; it does not guarantee events. Much of life after a move depends on language, work, people and circumstances that astrology does not see.

Example: Lionel Messi's chart for Barcelona

Lionel Messi was born on 24 June 1987 at 20:30 in Rosario, Argentina, and at 13 moved with his family to Barcelona, where he began his professional career. Let us compare his birth chart with the relocated chart for Barcelona (our calculation, Placidus houses).

	Rosario (natal)	Barcelona (relocated)
Ascendant	5°00′ Aquarius	25°09′ Pisces
MC	26°20′ Libra	27°28′ Sagittarius
Sun	5th house	4th house
Moon and Venus	5th house	3rd house
Jupiter	3rd house	1st house
Uranus	11th house	9th house, 3°05′ from the MC

The main change at the angles: in Barcelona, Uranus at 24°23′ Sagittarius comes up to the Midheaven, 3°05′ from the MC. In the birth chart for Rosario no planet stands that close to an angle. Tradition links Uranus near the MC with a career that takes an unconventional path and singles a person out early. The Ascendant moves from Aquarius into Pisces, and the chart ruler from Saturn and Uranus to Jupiter and Neptune. Jupiter, meanwhile, moves into the 1st house.

This describes how the emphasis in the chart shifts, not an explanation of a career. A chart does not replace talent, training and people's decisions, and for one city it says nothing about what would have happened in another.

Using a relocated chart for transits

Astrologers do not agree on whether someone who has long lived in another city should read transits against the birth chart or the relocated chart. The transiting planets are the same; only the houses they pass through change. A common approach: the birth chart stays primary, and the relocated chart is added when you need to understand in which area of life a transit will show in the place where the person lives now. Those who work this way usually compare both charts first and check whether the houses of important transits coincide.

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